It is said that winter is a season of recovery and preparation. With the end of a long break, Tech welcomes all students, old and new, with an array of events to start off this semester.
We, the residents of Michigan and its adjoining areas, are blessed with a bounty of flora and fauna specific to this climate and temperature only. One such wonderful place is Isle Royale National Park, which is a remote island cluster in Lake Superior. This group of tiny islands lies near Michigan’s border with Canada and boasts untainted wilderness filled with coniferous forests and innumerable lakes and waterways. This place is strictly maintained through the absence of vehicles and pollution so that it is a natural haven for moose and wolves to roam untethered. Isle Royale offers an unparalleled realm of solitude combined with impeccable scenic beauty.
Michigan Tech faculty Christopher Plummer, Elizabeth Meyer and Kent Cyr, who set off to record the sounds of Isle Royale, won a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study the natural music found there. A gallery of their collections has been placed in an installation in the Rozsa Art Gallery as an outgrowth of their “Listening to Parks” project. “Listening to Parks” is an exploration of local parks through diverse art forms in ways that will promote enjoyment, stewardship, and lifelong learning. “Our musical, visual and recorded explorations of what we hear will be interpreted and condensed into several different experiences that help others discover and appreciate this wonderful resource and to document this point in history”, says Christopher Plummer. Last summer, Libby Meyer, Kent Cyr and Christopher Plummer wrote a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service. This grant would fund a two-year project starting in May of 2015 that consists of gathering sounds and images, writing new music, creating and touring multimedia art installations, working with local art classes, and, finally, creating a full multimedia installation. The end result of these collections joins soundscapes and K-12 student artistic responses into the Rozsa Art Gallery exhibit alongside a new composition premiered by the Keweenaw Symphony Orchestra which merges orchestra and local national park soundscapes.
This astounding gallery will be on display from December 2-22 and from January 16-26 at the Rozsa Centre for Performing Arts, Gallery A-space. This event is free for everyone, and the gallery will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturdays. For more details about the grant, visit the Listening to Parks website at http://soundscapes.mtu.edu/listening_to_parks/ or contact the ticketing office at (906) 487-2073. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
